According to Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, the situation in eastern Ukraine will remain difficult for at least a month, but “there will be no Armageddon.”
Ukraine’s spy chief said this during an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“The good news is that there will be no Armageddon. The bad news is that the situation is quite difficult. It’s going to stay that way for at least a month, and it’s not going to get any easier,” Budanov said.
He said Ukraine would do everything possible to “minimize Russian successes.” However, when asked whether Ukraine would be able to hold the town of Chasiv Yar, Budanov said: “I will refrain from answering.”
The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency believes that the answer to Russia’s superiority in manpower is modern combat technologies, in which Ukraine has become a world leader, replacing people on the battlefield, where possible, with new variants of drones and electronic warfare.
“Technology will be important enough in this war that we won’t be fighting a war to the last citizen,” Budanov predicts.
Moving the war to Russia
He also described himself as a “fan” of moving the war to Russian territory using long-range drones.
“I have advocated this from the first days of the war, openly stating that as long as the war is localized on our territory, it will not touch Russia. That is why from the spring of 2022 we began to conduct significant operations on Russian territory, and we will go the farther, the more resources we have for this. And Russia has begun to feel it,” he said.
In other words, Budanov said, Russian leader Vladimir Putin can no longer pretend to his people that this war does not affect him.
“It is not yet critical for Russia at this stage, but it has led to the fact that the average citizen in the European part of the Russian Federation knows and feels exactly that the war continues, and has felt some of the explosions themselves. This affects, albeit on a small scale, their morale,” Budanov said.
He also opined that the White House’s warning to Kyiv not to strike the refineries made no sense because they were a legitimate military target. The attacks may not be able to turn the tide of the war, the intelligence chief acknowledged, but he believes they could affect the Russian economy “and psychological state,” which in turn “affects the military component.”
His intelligence agency announced that it considers any Russian military target within a 500-mile radius to be fair game.
Budanov noted that the US authorization to use American-made weapons to target sources of Russian fire directly across the border “will make our lives easier.” At the same time, he added that if Kyiv is allowed to use US weapons “to the entire so-called operational depth in Russia that we can reach, of course it will be easier for us.”
The spy chief of Ukraine also sees no point in peace talks, as “we have no other way out but to return what was occupied. Otherwise, the state of war will continue forever.”
Read more:
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